Moodle Reflection
Introduction
The Moodle project proved to be very rewarding and very challenging for me on many levels. Before, I became a teacher, one of my childhood friends, Barry, ended up going to jail twice. During the early 1990’s at the age of 18, Barry became involved with drugs and a youth gang and was convicted for the armed robbery of three Vancouver-area Safeway stores. He went to jail a subsequent time for stealing a car with his step-brother near Prince George.
One of the disturbing things that emerged from Barry’s incarceration was the reaction of his family and friends. For reasons that are too lengthy to discuss in this post, many of the people who were close to Barry turned their back on him when he went to jail. To be completely frank, I too had some doubts in my mind whether it was wise to maintain a friendship with someone whose life was in such a downward spiral.
Once Barry emerged from Prince George Regional Correctional Centre, he did what he needed to do stop using drugs and alcohol. I’m not exactly sure what triggered the change, but Barry simply says that he hit rock bottom while in prison in Prince George. Barry then moved to the Lower Mainland of B.C. and got a job with an employer in construction that was willing to hire released offenders.
Underlying principles of Constructivism & alignment with Moodle
When I started teaching Law 12 at an inner-city school in Surrey, I knew that I wanted to share Barry’s story and the story of real-life offenders, but in a way that was student-driven instead of teacher driven. I developed some instructional materials in the form of a written questionnaire that asked students at the time to identify the preconceptions they had about inmates & parolees and compare that with the real-life testimony of actual offenders and staff from the corrections system.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this approach was actually grounded in the learning theory of constructivism that has shaped so much in the field of education today, including the development of the Learning Management System, Moodle (Bonk & Pan, 2007). Constructivism encompasses many things, but it can be defined as including four essential elements:
- eliciting prior knowledge;
- creating cognitive dissonance;
- application of new knowledge with feedback;
- and reflection on learning. (Baviskar et al., 2009)
In my Moodle unit and classroom activities, the use of a poll at the start of each unit was my attempt to flush out what the students already know about sentencing and prison life. Cognitive dissonance was created through the testimonies of real offenders and academic research that in many instances clashes with widely held misconceptions about Canada’s correctional system.
Terry Anderson (2008) has touched on this learner-centered practice of eliciting prior knowledge in his paper, Towards a Theory of Online Learning. He writes:
Learner-centered learning, according to Bransford et al., includes awareness of the unique cognitive structures and understandings that the learners bring to the learning context…. Learner-centered activities make extensive use of diagnostic tools and activities, so that these pre-existing knowledge structures are made visible to both the teacher and the student.
The advantage that Moodle provides is that opens up the affordances of the web to poll and connect with real-life experts and offenders in a way that I could never do in a physical classroom. To help students understand the prison system in an authentic way, students need to speak directly with an offender. Bringing an offender into any school poses significant challenges. In past years, I got around this problem by working with the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC). There are CSC officers who will escort a low-risk parolee into schools for speaking engagements.
With Moodle, I had the chance to take the level of authenticity up a notch. Instead of speaking with an offender that students know little about, my students will be able to speak directly with Barry who now lives in Toronto through the use of Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). As I understand it, all teachers in B.C. have access to Collaborate through LearnNowBC and this resources aligns very well with the social constructivist pedagogy that underlies the design of Moodle (Bonk & Pan, 2007).
By having students work in groups to question Barry and a correctional officer in Collaborate, students will be working collaboratively to construct knowledge that hopefully will be enduring.
Learning Design Influences
Chickering & Ehrmann (1996) and Bates & Poole (2003) both played a significant role in the design of my Moodle modules. Chickering & Ehrmann write:
#3. Good Practice Uses Active Learning Techniques
Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing prepackaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write reflectively about it, relate it to past experiences, and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.
As part of their landmark SECTIONS model Bates & Poole (2003), note the following in their discussion about students, the S in SECTIONS:
We need to ensure when designing courses that we offer more than one approach to teaching and learning within the same course. For instance, we need to ensure that there is well-structured, relevant information easily available to students, but also that there are opportunities for students to seek out new or different information. This information should be available in a variety of media, such as text, diagrams, and video, with concrete examples explicitly related to underlying principles.
Although my Moodle modules still need some revision, I think that they provide students with an opportunity to internalize the carceral experience in a fairly authentic way.
Early this semester, I decided that I would share the finished product with fellow Law 12 teachers in the Surrey School District (SD#36). This is one of the reasons why I designed in Dreamweaver as I could then migrate the finished web pages onto my own website and other LMS’s. I have gotten some feedback from a SD#36 colleague and she suggests that the purpose behind my Moodle unit may be clarified by including guiding questions early in the Modules to help students better frame their learning. She did mention that the wide use of media, clean presentation, and variety of options for presentation of the Prison Life project were some of the strengths of the design. Much of this focus on active learning and variety, of course, came from the recommendations of Bates & Poole, and Chickering & Sampson.
Technical & other Issues
For the past few years, as an online educator, I have worked with a various LMS platforms: WebCT, Blackboard 9.1, and D2L version 9. Etec 565A was the first opportunity that I had to work with Moodle in a serious way. My previous foray into Moodle had been a group project in Etec 531 where our group had decided to use the open source web authoring software NVU with less than desirable results. In that course, I had the chance to view Gillian Sudlow’s work with Moodle. Gillian teaches in Vancouver and had un-earthed this very clean looking Creative Commons template entitled Smooth and Sleek from edge3.co.uk designs in the U.K. Gillian’s work with Moodle can be viewed here: http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/CUSTmoodle/course/view.php?id=58 . With removal of some un-necessary block of code and minor modifications to the CSS file to change colours, I re-worked the Smooth and Sleek template for the purposes of a unit on Corrections.
The next major challenge came in the design of the splash page. I decided to use a Creative Commons javascript slideshow at the top of my landing page. Normally, this is a very easy procedure, but Moodle kept adding code (a target for each image) when the images were, in fact, not linked to any URL. This extra code messed with the Tigra Fader javascript and the only way I could find to resolve this was the use of an iframe with the slideshow hosted on my own website. At Surrey Connect, where I am now employed, we use iframes to get around the restrictions posed by our current LMS, Blackboard 9.1. As I designed the subsequent pages, I found that the iframes provided by Scribd, Microsoft Web Apps, and Google allowed me to pack a lot of content into pages while maintaining some ease of navigation. Not everyone promotes the use of iframes, but they do permit students to stay within the password-protected confines of the LMS and this facilitates student safety – which is one of the considerations mentioned in Bates & Poole’s (2003) discussion of the SECTIONS model.
Other than the minor hiccup with javascript, Moodle proved to be an exceptional tool. Of all the LMS’s that I have worked with, Moodle is the most flexible. I was amazed with the wide range of functionality that Moodle provides to both teachers, students, and presumably to LMS administrators as well. The options for student tools, grouping, selective release, reporting, communication, and so on are very impressive. Moodle is currently not an approved resource in School District # 36 (Surrey). There are a few teachers in our district who are advocating overturn the present ban on Moodle. I will join them in their efforts and hopefully help our district to move forward using Moodle. The only question that remains for me is whether I will use the Moodle resources that I developed in work as an online educator or as a blended classroom teacher as my fight with tendinitis has forced me to re-consider my career path.
Overall, the LMS course site project helped me to digitize and share resources about Barry’s story that I have long been wishing to use in an e-learning environment. The project also helped me to gain exposure to Moodle and to strengthen my skills with Dreamweaver, CSS, and javascript. As I explained to colleagues at work who have viewed my modules, the coding may not be elegant, but everything works (I hope) and I learned a great deal about e-learning and myself in the process.
References
Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson (Ed.),The theory and practice of online learning (2nd ed., pp. 45-74). Edmonton, Canada: Athabasca University Press.
Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In EffectiveTeaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.
Baviskar, N., Hartle, T, and Whitney, T. (2009). Essential Criteria to Characterize Constructivist Teaching: Derived from a review of the literature and applied to five constructivist‐teaching method articles. International Journal of Science Education. 31 (4). Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09500690701731121
Chickering, A.W. and Ehrmann, S.C. (1996). “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever,” American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), p. 3-6. Retrieved fromhttp://www.aahea.org/articles/sevenprinciples.htm